A top adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been accused of endangering human rights workers throughout the hemisphere with a “venomous lie” tying them to drug cartels, a civil rights advocate warned.
Eric Geressy, Hegseth’s senior adviser for strategy, made the remarks linking nongovernmental organizations to cartels on Oct. 27 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to defense chiefs from 19 nations in a counter-cartel coalition, the Department of Defense said.
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, expressed alarm over the statement on X Tuesday.
“This evidence-free claim of links between NGOs and vicious criminal groups endangers human rights defenders throughout the hemisphere,” Isacson wrote, calling the remarks “a venomous lie from a top US Defense Department official.”
“Whoa! This is crazy,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote as he shared Isacson’s post.
Geressy told the chiefs that the cartels have started fighting U.S. and allied forces in court.
“Having lost parity on the physical battlefield, these cartels have opened an asymmetric line of effort, lawfare,” he said in the speech, defining lawfare as “the calculated weaponization of legal systems.” After asserting without examples that the cartels finance and run NGOs, he added, “They file spurious human rights petitions.”
That description would cover the first known formal challenge to the U.S. military’s strikes on alleged drug boats, a human rights petition that names Hegseth as the perpetrator.
The family of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza filed it with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging he was killed in a Sept. 15, 2025, strike, NPR reported. The family says it has received threats since his death.
The Pentagon referred questions to the White House, and President Donald Trump has said the strike killed three “narcoterrorists from Venezuela.”
“Our forces adhere uncompromisingly to core tenets of the law of war,” Geressy said in Santo Domingo. “Do not allow their lawyers to achieve what their hitmen and smugglers could not.”
Hegseth has already moved against the lawyers who advise the military. Soon after taking office, he fired the top lawyers for the Army and Air Force, CBS News reported. In a 2024 book, he called some military lawyers “Jagoffs” and accused them of “tying the hands of warfighters.”
He also slashed civilian-harm staff at the military’s combatant commands “by more than 90 percent,” according to a letter from Senate Democrats. Those staff work on preventing harm to civilians during U.S. combat operations.
After cutting those checks inside the Pentagon, Hegseth’s team is now urging allied militaries to resist legal challenges from outside it.
Geressy also tied his warning to Hegseth’s stance on the International Criminal Court.
“Secretary Hegseth made this clear regarding the International Criminal Court,” Geressy said. “The ICC is an illegitimate extrajudicial instrument that threatens sovereign defense.” He said the department was deploying protections against the court “[t]ogether with the Department of State.”